Lighting and Meaning of Touch of Evil

The film Touch of Evil is about betrayal, corruption of authority figures and appearance vs. reality. This is evident in the scene where Susan, Vargas’ wife, was laying on a bed in the Ritz Hotel. Quinlan and Grandi enter the rundown hotel room. Quinlan, who suspects that Grandi may betray him, plans a way to hide his involvement the plot to frame Susan and Vargas. He locks the door and takes out Vargas’s gun to force Grandi to phone the police of Susan’s Whereabouts. Quinlan then puts on black gloves and proceeds to strangle Grandi with one of Susan’s leggings in a way that symbolizes his own wife’s murder. Grandi then falls over dead onto the bed frame, right above Susan’s face.. Quinlan then leaves the room, forgetting his cane again. Director Orson Welles helps us understand the mood and theme of the movie using light. At the time where Quinlan and Grandi enter the hotel room, the only light is the Uncertain electric and somewhat neon lights coming from the window. The mostly dark and shadowy lights insinuate the evil that the men hoped to accomplish. The hard lighting of this scene attracted the audience to the faces of the characters to expose their true intentions. I feel that Welles used sidelighting throughout the film, including my chosen scene because it lighted the characters in a way that showed through their false identities. For example Hank Quinlan was a hugely respected cop for about 30 years until he basically outed himself by leaving his cane at the scene of the crime. All throughout the hotel scene, his face had a sort of trail of small and large shadows upon it. This, in my opinion, made his character a little more intriguing in the sense that he himself was an entirely different mystery to solve. I wanted to explore his state of mind to figure out why he reacts to things the way he does. The hotel room scene had a high contrast lighting because it appeared strong. The character’s facial expressions were clear and some of the most important features were highlighted. The black and white color of the film added to the utter excitement and almost dramatic feeling of the movie. If it had been in color, the film would not have been as effective because black and white can be symbolized as the unknown, whereas color tends to bring everything out into the open.

Subscribe

Get Teen Ink’s 48-page monthly print edition. Written by teens since 1989.